Could NSA porn spying revelations make privacy concerns click?

The latest bombshell leak from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden reveals that: “The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches.”

The story in the Huffington Post, lead written by Glenn Greenwald, reports that the NSA document identified six Muslim targets whose “personal vulnerabilities” could be exploited to undermine their credibility. The document says that evidence of “viewing sexually explicit material online” and “using explicit persuasive language when communicating with inexperienced young girls” can be used to “call into question a radicalizer’s devotion to the jihadist cause.”

The NSA hasn’t accused any of the individuals of being involved in terrorist plots, according to the story. The agency believes all six currently live outside the United States, although one is identified as a “U.S. person.”

Applied narrowly to active recruiters for Al-Qaeda or direct participants in terrorist plots, the tactic seems like a legitimate form a spycraft. I wholeheartedly approved when the U.S. let slip that Osama bin Laden was a dedicated porn watcher, insofar as it undermined the supposed piety of a man who was, in reality, a mass murderer.

But as always the concern lies with the NSA making decisions about appropriate targets and boundaries absent any outside scrutiny. At what point does a devout Muslim preacher become a “radicalizer?” At what point does the leader of a protest movement, like Occupy Wall Street, become a “radicalizer?”

It’s worth recalling that U.S. spy agencies have a horrendous track record on this issue.

In the mid-70s, it became clear the government had engaged in systematic surveillance of various domestic targets, including Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon and Daniel Ellsberg, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted in a recent post. The FBI’s first director, J. Edgar Hoover, maintained a “Sex Deviate” file that he wielded as a political weapon, as the CATO Institute reminded us today.

“This is straight out of the J. Edgar Hoover playbook,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director at EFF in San Francisco, on Wednesday. “These people aren’t terrorist suspects, it’s clear from the documents. They’re people who are saying things that the government doesn’t like.”

“It’s why we have checks and balances in our system, it’s why we don’t let the government do mass surveillance … and it’s why we make them go before a judge before you do this,” she added. “Otherwise you get mission creep and things like this, sadly.”

“Wherever you are, the NSA’s databases store information about your political views, your medical history, your intimate relationships and your activities online,” he said. “The NSA says this personal information won’t be abused, but these documents show that the NSA probably defines ‘abuse’ very narrowly.”

Another interesting question about the latest spying revelation is: how will it alter the public perception of the spying scandal? The average person lacks a clear mental model of how NSA analysis of phone call and email metadata affects their privacy and lives.

But as the joke goes: Eight out of ten people watch porn — and the other two are liars.

So will news that the NSA is monitoring porn habits — for the specific purpose of embarrassing people — suddenly make all this privacy hubbub click?

“Essentially, Glenn’s story makes salient the fact that the NSA has access (and is using) a great deal of sensitive information about individuals that can be used in some way to embarrass, manipulate, or harm them,” said Ashkan Soltani, a privacy and security researcher who worked on several of the NSA stories for the Washington Post.

“While many feel that the government is justified in collecting this information in order to identify terrorist activities, I suspect many will question the use of this over-reaching collection apparatus for monitoring the porn-watching activities of the masses,” he added.